The progress of the information age brings unprecedented changes to the human society. The requirements related the personal information are being growing dramatically day by clay. As the result, the personal identification, protection and security become extremely important in the modern age.
There are various methods of personal and/or biometric identification have been developed, including fingerprinting, face-voice-recognition, vein pattern (iris, palm), etc.
There are multiple problems associated with the existing methods, such as requirement for in-contact authentication procedure, time-consuming or obstructive procedure, unreliable measurements and low recognition rate.
For example, the accuracy of a face-recognition-based personal identification is relatively low as the technology has to overcome the problems of lighting, pose, orientation and gesture. Fingerprint identification is widely used for personal identification. However, it is difficult to acquire fingerprint features (i.e. minutiae), for some people such as elderly people, manual laborers, etc. Moreover, in-contact identification devices may invoke hygiene concern and reluctance to use by a general public. As a result, other biometric characteristics are receiving increasing attention.
Recently, a growing trend towards relieving the users from a contact device has emerged and the idea of peg-free, or further contact-free, hand biometrics have been is proposed. The hand vein recognition technology has been also proposed for image biometrical verification, see, for example U.S. Pat. No. 4,699,149 by Rice, US20120281890 by Kamakura and U.S. Pat. No. 5,787,185 by Clayden.
Compared to other biometric authentication techniques, the vein recognition has many advantages, such as uniqueness, life-long, time invariant consistency of the vein-pattern for each human body, as well as a non-contact, fast, unobtrusive vein-pattern image acquisition procedure.
FIG. 1 shows the typical example of matched portions of the two superimposed vein-patterns of a person, as shown in U.S. Pat. No. 5,787,185 by Clayden.
The advancement in biometric image matching technology has promoted the development of various biometric identification systems.
Vein biometric systems are also capable to record the infrared absorption patterns to produce unique and private identification templates for users, see, for example U.S. Pat. No. 8,229,178 by Zhang.
The matching and comparison of images is part of many modern computer-vision applications. Image registration, camera calibration, object recognition, and image retrieval, to mention a few, see for example U.S. Pat. No. 8,165,401 by Funayama.
The contemporary compact devices such as a smartphone are capable of performing the task of finding correspondences between two images. Moreover, the smartphone can be modified to process the image at the infrared part of the spectrum with minimal or no modification.
The disclosed invention provides a novel, compact, fast, portable and mobile authentication and identification device of a person biased on person's hand vein-pattern.
The preferred embodiment of the invention uses an image of the vein-pattern of a dorsal (back) side of a human palm for biometric authentication of a person. There is no limitation, however, to apply the disclosed method to the front side of human palm, as well as to other regions of skin of human body, as long as blood vessels are located relatively close to the skin surface.
The surface of the person's hand dorsal side is less susceptible to accidental damage, thus making disclose device preferable for the situations of field deployment. Moreover, it is much more convenient to acquire the images of the hand dorsal side of small children and newborns.
Furthermore, for small children it might be preferable to use the images of their feet particularly in infrared spectrum.
The disclosed device and technology is relies on the discovering intrinsically specific points of interest and match them using geometric affine, projective, or other types of geometric transformations.
The disclosed device and technology is relies on the image processing algorithm similar to Speeded-Up Robust Features (SURF) algorithm reported by Bay et. al. in “Surf: Speeded up robust features”, ECCV (European Conference on Computer Vision), 2006, pp. 404-417.
Together with this algorithm the disclosed device employs geometric affine and projective transformations which are insensitive to rotations, scaling, tilt, image plane, etc., making the disclosed our technology applicable to biometric identification of humans of all ages: from newborns to adults.
The term “vein-pattern”, as used herein is defined as the image having a pattern of veins, capillaries and other blood vessels that are unique for each individual.
The term “PAD”, as used herein is defined as any mobile Portable Assistance Device, such as a cell phone, a smartphone, a tablet computer, a personal computer, etc.
The term “identification”, as used herein is defined as a procedure of providing and proving an identity of the individual by searching against a database of previously acquired information.
The term “NIR”, as used herein is defined as electromagnetic radiation within the 750 mm-2500 nm range of the spectrum.
The term “point of interest” of an image, as used herein is defined as a pixel of the image with a specific coordinates on the image. The local image features around of the point of interest are stable under local and global image perturbations, such as deformations as those arising from perspective transformations (e.g. affine transformations, scale changes, rotations and/or translations) as well as illumination/brightness variations, such that the locations of the points of interest can be reliably computed with a high degree of reproducibility.
The term “descriptor” of a point of interest, as used here is defined as a set of numeric values, usually represented by a 64-dimentional vector, which contains information about the local environment of the point of interest.
In the general embodiment of the invention, the image acquisition is performed using a PAD. In such embodiment the PAD-connected camera is used to obtain the images of blood veins. The camera can be either a PAD built-in camera or connected to the PAD by a wire or wirelessly.
In other embodiment of the invention the disclosed personal authentication device includes a switching capabilities between visible and near infrared spectral ranges, namely, acquiring the vein-patter image from a person under the visible and the near infrared spectrum and subsequent extracting points of interest, their locations and descriptors, from the acquired images.
In another embodiment of invention a lighting feature is provided by the device to improve the quality of the image both in the visible and the near infrared spectral regions.
The disclosed device for non-contact person authentication and identification do not require a direct contact between the disclosed biometric device and a human subject, making it indispensible tool for sterile hospital environment when the alleviation of possible contamination is important.
Being portable, the disclosed invention can provide an immediate personnel identification or authorization at virtually any location. The invention might also be important for the personal working in remote areas or in the areas with underdeveloped/damaged infrastructure.
The disclosed invention can also find a particular application in instances where the restricted authorized access is required, such as admission to secure sites, operation of sensitive machinery or credit/cash dispensing.
It is also possible to use the disclosed invention for statistical data analysis and medical diagnostics.
Moreover, the disclosed invention can be used for indication of subcutaneous bleeding, new born birth trauma, arthritis, symptoms of a high blood pressure and atherosclerosis, etc.
Further features and aspects of the present invention will become apparent from the following description of preferred and optional embodiments with reference to the attached drawings.